Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film goes most disastrously wrong when it tries to turn slice-of-life realism into full-scale melodrama. At first it is interesting, and funny, when Travis becomes obsessed with a cool socialite (Cybill Shepherd) who is a campaign worker for a too slick, too vacuous presidential candidate. Their relationship begins with his following her around at a distance, proceeds to his awkward efforts to date her, ends when he takes her to a skin flick. It makes a nice little essay in the confusions of cross-cultural courtship. However, Travis' failure as presented is more farcical than tragic...
...Syndrome, Fussell says, has led to "gross dichotomizing...a persisting imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, it would seem, to the actualities of the Great War." He believes the war led to the habit of simple distinction, simplification and opposition. Here he expands his argument to include "paranoid melodrama," the rumor-mongering, and the civilian/soldier dichotomy associated with the war. This latter argument is particularly convincing, since it shows how press censorship and government propaganda suppressing the grim horrors of war alienated the soldier from civilians...
Bergman took up the challenge here, too. He has cooked up a few plot devices in an effort to give the tale some grit and human motivation, and comes dangerously close to melodrama. About halfway through the film we learn that Sarastro, High Priest of the Temple, was once the Queen of the Night's consort, is actually Pamina's father, and has snatched her from her mother's clutches out of paternal concern for her own good. According to the original text this is all wrong. The High Priest is traditionally a somewhat remote cult figure; here...
...melodrama all this is acceptable, though extended for two and a half hours somewhat tiresome. As a film with a message, this is pernicious bullshit. Nurse Ratched's vicious attack on Billy is completely out of character. Nothing in the film up to this point has suggested that her chief purpose is to keep patients under her domination and not to help them. Or are we supposed to take her preference for order over chaos, for cleanliness over filth, as the real prelude to such a cruel act? Her chief role has been to protect the weaker members...
...appears that the facts of ordinary life must be abandoned when watching the soaps. There are more doctors than there are patients to treat. Amnesia is a plague. Neighbors are not friendly; they are sharks. Despite the melodrama, the surface proprieties are strictly observed; no one, for example, ever swears...